1. When in doubt, pile ingredients into the cooking pot and pray.
By combining monster parts and actual food ingredients, you're likely to create some disgusting things. These meals are known only as Dubious Food. They tend to give one or two hearts at the most, but you can get more out of it by using heartier food — a hearty radish and a blue lizard produced the concoction above.
Yes, it's far from the most useful recipe here in terms of overall impact, but it never hurts to have a handful of these around just in case. More often than not, you'll need a few hearts and not a dozen. Most importantly, it was extremely rare that I found myself without ingredients for this dish. And that's crucial.
2. Cook with durian.
Durian is far from a standard fruit in North America, but in Asia, it's far more common. The fruit is prominently heralded in "Breath of the Wild" — it makes ridiculously useful meals that extend your maximum health far beyond normal.
In case you hadn't already noticed, the meal I made above — using five durians and nothing else — both fully recovers Link's health and grants him an extra 20 hearts. Twenty! If you can't defeat an enemy with that much health on your side, you need to rethink your combat strategy.
3. Sneak around that enemy encampment, even without a sneaky outfit, by increasing your stealth with food.
The concept of eating something that makes you stealthier is bizarre, no doubt, but it's a useful solution in Hyrule. Even after dozens of hours with "Breath of the Wild," I'm still encountering camps of enemies that devastate me. Easier than fighting them, why not sneak around?
By combining silent shrooms — which are found all over Hyrule, often at the base of trees — with meat, I created this skewer that repaired Link's health and temporarily made him harder to detect. No more fight; I'm sneaking right past those jerks.
4. For every four Spirit Orbs you collect from shrines across Hyrule, you can trade for a new heart container or a stamina container. Rather than increase stamina, use stamina-rich foods.
The Enduring Steamed Meat dish was created using raw meat and stamella shrooms — a mushroom found all over Hyrule, particularly at the base of trees. By combining raw meat, a stamella shroom, and Hyrule Herb (found all over the place), I created this simple dish that massively increases health while also refilling stamina.
Even better: It increases stamina beyond normal, granting a temporary boost to overall stamina. This is tremendously useful in a ton of instances. Say you're climbing a mountain and nearly out of stamina, about to fall to your death — pause the game and snack on this dish! Solved!
5. You're not limited to creating food items in "Breath of the Wild." You could just as easily mix together some monster parts and create an elixir that saves your hide.
Perhaps you need to escape somewhere quickly? Or maybe you just want to skip over a long mountain climb more quickly? The Hasty Elixir, created by combining a Keese wing (the bats) and a hot-footed frog, will help you out. Keese are found everywhere, especially at night — defeat one (or several) and pick up the wings they leave behind. Hot-footed frogs are harder to find, though you're likely to spot them in lakes and ponds across Hyrule.
6. Much of our recipe list thus far has focused on how to survive the elements. But what about a particularly difficult enemy? For starters, you'll want to increase how powerful you are. And to do that, you'll want to cook Mighty Bananas with other ingredients.
In this instance, I cooked bananas with mushrooms. Sounds gross! But it turned out a dish that gave Link four hearts and boosted his attack ability for a limited time. And you'll need that ability boosted as often as possible — you're just as likely to be killed by a common enemy as you are by a boss enemy. Hyrule is a tough place to survive.
7. You're likely to visit some especially hot locations. For this, you'll need heat resistance.
To create the Chilly Salt-Grilled Prime Meat dish, I cooked rock salt, raw prime meat, and cool safflina — a flower found all over Hyrule. Not only does this give Link a bunch of health, but it enables "low-level heat resistance." If you're venturing into the Gerudo Desert or to Death Mountain, you'll need to have some of these handy.
8. Similarly, if you're trying to survive during a thunderstorm, some electricity resistance will help you out. Turn to the combination of volt fruit and meat.
The combination of volt fruit and raw meat turns out an Electro Meat Skewer. Eating it gives you resistance to electricity for a limited time. If you're in a pinch, fighting electric enemies or in a dangerous area full of loose wires, this skewer is the one to turn to. It'll also repair some health, naturally.
9. Resist cold with hot peppers.
Hyrule is a wildly diverse ecosystem. There are freezing mountain ridges and scorching hot deserts that dip to freezing temperatures at night. There's an alluvial plain where lightning and rain never stops. It's quite a place!
One of the first missions you're tasked with in "Breath of the Wild," before the game's massive open world is open to you, is reaching a shrine in an area that's simply too cold for Link to go. He starts freezing to death quickly, and it's solved only by constantly restoring lost health or, as luck would have it, by cooking a meal with hot peppers. You can simply simmer one directly in a cooking pot, or you can cook it with other ingredients.
10. Basic survival with apples.
Whether you have one or 50, apples — and other basic fruits you find all over Hyrule — are far more useful when cooked. Early on, you're going to find a ton of apples. And because you have just three hearts, it's tempting to eat them piecemeal, uncooked; they replenish half a heart apiece. When cooked, they double in usefulness. When cooked in bunches, they become even more restorative.
Better yet: You can cook apples without the cooking pot. If you find a lit fire, just dump your apples on top and pick up the "baked apples" it produces. You'll learn quickly that the cooking system in Hyrule is far more forgiving than real life.
Rather than cooking up questionable concoctions of mushroom and banana, here are 10 tremendously useful recipes to become the best Chef of the Wild.
Voila! This mix of banana and mushroom sounds gross, but it repairs two hearts. Not a lot of help, but it's something. Even the most unexciting combinations can be helpful in a pinch.
After finding the cooking pot/fire, you can cook by opening the inventory and selecting Hold on up to five ingredients.
Before you learn any useful recipes, you need to know how to cook: Find a fire with a cooking pot over it! These are all over the place, but you can find them most readily in towns or in moblin camps.
Of note: I found this cooking pot over a stack of wood, unlit. But don't despair if you find as much. By selecting a flint from your inventory, choosing to "hold" it, and then dropping it under the fire, you can restart the fire for cooking. After placing the flint, strike it with any metal weapon — like an ax or a sword — to start a fire.
